Books reviews with the occasional interview thrown in for good measure

50 Books We’re Looking Forward to in 2015 (Part 2 brought to you by Peter Wild)

In Real Life by Chris Killen – It’s been a few years since we’ve had the pleasure of reading a new Chris Killen book, but In Real Life, his follow-up to the exquisite The Bird Room, is almost finally here. Expect a review and an interview with the great man himself very early in the new year…

The Field of the Cloth of Gold by Magnus Mills – ‘The balance of power wrought between the occupants of The Great Field, as it is properly known, is a delicate one, and relationships are stretched to breaking point when a new, large and disciplined group offers to share its surplus of milk pudding…’ What more could anyone in the world need to be excited about Magnus Mills’ new one, The Field of the Cloth of Gold?

Lucky Alan & Other Stories by Jonathan Lethem – Released in the States in February and in the UK we assume later in the year, Jonathan Lethem’s latest collection of short stories, Lucky Alan and Other Stories, has been described thus: “Some of these tales—such as “Pending Vegan,” which wonderfully captures a parental ache and anguish during a family visit to an aquatic theme park—are, in Lethem’s words, “obedient (at least outwardly) to realism.” Others, like “The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear,”, which deftly and hilariously captures the solipsism of blog culture, feature “the uncanny and surreal elements that still sometimes erupt in my short stories.” Anyone wishing to get ahead can read the title story in the New Yorker.

We are Pirates by Daniel Handler – ‘A dark and rollicking pirate story for grown-ups’, Daniel Handler’s latest novel We Are Pirates comes emblazoned with cover quotes from a great many of our favourites (Jess Walters, Neil Gaiman, Lorrie Moore, Jennifer Egan) – we expect to have a lot of fun when we finally get to dip between these covers…

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy – Tom McCarthy has already described Satin Island as “a leitmotif of a parachutist falling to earth, having realised that his parachute has been sabotaged: his relation to the landscape, death, technology.” So in response let us say we are intrigued without quite frothing wildly at the mouth.

The Miner by Natsume Soseki – A reissue of The Miner by Natsume Soseki gets us excited because it possibly means that lots and lots of Haruki Murakami fans will get the opportunity to sink their teeth into a great Japanese author. “The Miner is the most daringly experimental and least well known novel of the great Meiji novelist Natsume Soseki. An absurdist novel about the indeterminate nature of human personality, The Miner, written in 1908, was in many was a precursor to the now-infamous work of Joyce and Beckett.”

New American Stories, ed. Ben Marcus – Herein are the luminaries of the form like Deborah Eisenberg, George Saunders, and Denis Johnson, as well as the best new voices of today, like Wells Tower, Claire Vaye Watkins and Rivka Galchen. Practitioners of deep realism like Anthony Doerr and Yilun Li brush shoulders with genre-bending wonders like Charles Yu and Kelly Link. Finally there are the true emerging stars, like Tao Lin and Rachel Glasser standing next to long established writer like Joy Williams.

The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson – Sounds, to the ear of a seasoned Johnson reader, a little bit like Fiskadoro, his futuristic dystopia, shot through with the unblinking eye you find in his nonfiction (if you haven’t read Denis Johnson’s Seek – you should). We’ll be reading this one over Christmas if you want to feel a bit jealous…

The Harder they Come by TC Boyle – TC Boyle’s latest, The Harder They Come, promises to be ‘A deep and disturbing meditation on the roots of American gun violence’, and looks set to be Boyle’s first engagement with contemporary America in novel form since Talk Talk, which is one of his best, back in 2011. To say we can’t wait for this one is the first great understatement of 2015.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson – “In 2012, Jon Ronson’s online identity was stolen. Jon publicly confronted the imposters, a trio of academics who had created a Jon Ronson Twitter bot obsessed by unlikely food combinations and weird sex. At first, Jon was delighted to find strangers all over the world uniting to support him in his outrage. The wrongdoers were quickly shamed into stopping. But then things got out of hand.” We’ll find out more when So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson is published in March…

Coming up in part three tomorrow: new Evie Wyld! new Jon McGregor! new Joe Hill! new Anne Enright! and more!